Bay 12 Games Forum

Does nobody play Angband instead of Nethack or this? (off topic)

As a heathen atheist who's going to go to hell, I'm not that familiar with everything from the bible, but there must be other potential megaprojects from there.  The walls of Jericho? Noah's ark?

Actually, none of the Biblical "megaprojects" would really be all that "mega," by DF standards certainly. Things were much smaller in the past (population, and hence, cities, as well as buildings), and Judea was no Rome. The biggest, most impressive architecture relevant to the Bible, by far, would be Egypt, Babylon and Rome. Israelite ruins actually tend to be quite modest, as do most ancient ruins that aren't in the heart of a world-spanning empire.

I think we were always all agreed that any argument is pointless...it was supposed to just be for shits and giggles

Guys, if you're going to argue about dwarf beards, keep it self-consciously ridiculous, such as applying concepts from evolutionary biology to creatures that we have no evolutionary information on. Otherwise you end up just calling the other person a pervert

How did you convert the Biblical measurements (cubits, etc) into DF measurements? Given that nobody has any way of figuring out how big an in-game tile is?

I think there's way too many differences between dwarves and neandertals to use them as models. Neandertals are practically human; hell they have "human" in their genus name they probably interbred with us. Dwarves are definitely further off...maybe still in the same genus, but it'd be pushing it. In any case, if there were a significant advantage to them all having beards, I don't think growing hair on your face when you've already got it on lots of other body parts is something that would take so long to evolve. It's certainly not an eye.

Of course, all these rambly evolutionary arguments are still influenced by the fact that I'm a strong ladybeard partisan.

Also, between the androgynous nature of dwarves in DF, and having read Discworld at a young age, I have enough reason to support beards, but that picture of the crossbow-mom pretty much clinches it. And is probably a sufficient cause in itself.

Edit: Actually, dwarves would probably be in the same genus, as they're also as intelligent as humans. Then again, they're probably intelligent in a different way - I think the way their minds work would be, while similar in some ways, fundamentally alien in other ways. The question is, if a less-intelligent creature like Homo Habilis is closer to us than an equally but differently intelligent creature like a dwarf? If not, dwarves would be "homo beardmagmus" or what have you.

Is anybody else having the same situation as me?

I reduced my "layers above ground" and my number of layers above the first cavern, but still have 3 cavern layers. Ground level will generally be at z-level 140 or so, then the caves will be 8-10 layers below that, 4 or 5 levels high, with a z-level or two between them. Then the magma sea is around 100-110, and the circus is usually somewhere in the 90's. And I can't move the viewer down to any lower z-level than that! Are there 96 layers of circus below the eerie pits? Or what's going on here?

After screwing around with worldgen settings until I got caves I liked (that is to say, increasing the size of caverns, setting density to 0 and openness to 100), I founded Granitegrowl. Like Junglecastle, it was in a tropical moist broadleaf forest populated by carp, hippos, elephants, various primates, and lots of trees. Things were going nicely, I got a wooden wall set up on the surface and dug down to the first cavern, where I began carving my fort into the giant columns of stone and setting up my farms and stockpiles on the open mud surfaces after clearing them of trees.

This will be the last time I start building in caves without walling off the outside of the caverns. The cave crocodile that had been lurking the lake at some point crawled out, into my fort, and started chewing dwarves to pieces. 3 of them died this way before someone got lucky and smashed the thing's brain with a pick. At this point, madness struck and my foodsmith/woodcutter began tantruming. He was carrying a battle axe and beheaded one of my miners and carved a dog into pieces, then calmed down for a while. Next another dwarf went mad and began running around the jungle babbling wildly. This was the scene that greeted two migrants, who promptly set to work hauling body parts to the refuse pile.

One by one, the remaining dwarves of the founding 7 succumbed to madness or melancholy. One was put out of his misery by a Reacher that came up from the second level of the caverns to the surface. Finally I sent the two new arrivals, who were emotionally unaffected by the deaths and therefore still sane, down to investigate the circus, which I'd never seen before. About 20 clowns made of salt, snow and cinders proceeded to slow my FPS to single digits and put an end to the awful failure of an expedition.